


The Not Quite Witch and the Knight in Preppy Armor

by RembrandtsWife



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Fairy Tale Style, Gen, Spells & Enchantments, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-05
Updated: 2017-02-05
Packaged: 2018-09-22 02:48:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9579092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RembrandtsWife/pseuds/RembrandtsWife
Summary: She couldn't save her husband; she might be able to save her son.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt "Love spells". Not beta'd.
> 
> Check, Please! is created by Ngozi Ukazu, to whom I am extremely grateful.

Once upon a time, a young woman who was not quite a witch married a handsome young man who was not quite a stuck-up prude.

His family name was Knight, and she called him her knight in preppy armor, though usually not to his face. Though she bestowed the nickname with affection, he didn't like it much; he didn't like to be reminded that for all his attempts at being a free spirit, he was obviously a boy who had never gone to a school that wasn't private, single-sex, and expensive, at least until he went to Yale and went co-ed. He tried hard, however, and she saw the makings of a free and joyous person in him, and she thought she could help him set himself free.

So she married him.

By the time her belly began to swell with a child, however, her knight had put on his preppy armor once again and locked his spirit into a small box full of the money he stood to inherit if he did what pleased his father. When her little boy was big enough to toddle, she found a job teaching the joys of literature to young people who still soft and free, still able to bend and change. Some days she took her little boy with her to work, where he sat behind the desk and listened and scribbled while she lectured from the podium, wrote on the blackboard, and led discussions.

Her boy was away at school when the terrible truth came out, all the people that her once shining knight had cheated as part of his business. When he came home for Thanksgiving, she had to tell her son that daddy would not be there, that they would never have holidays together again. 

He only looked at her with those eyes green as agates, so like his father's and so unlike, and said, "Good. He's a shitty human being and I don't want him around."

In her heart, however, she feared that he might someday turn out like his father. That his free spirit might be tied down and tamed; that despite all she tried to teach him about respecting people as people regardless of gender or race or sexual behavior, he would marry the sort of enchanted doll his father's parents had hoped he would marry and become exactly like his father and have children who would be obedient enchanted dolls in their turn. 

So as her boy began to look around, and girls began to turn his head, she summoned up her long-dormant witchy skills. She went walking under the full moon despite the chill of the night. She drank herbal teas that tasted faintly of rot no matter how much honey she poured in them. She danced naked by the light of a single candle. And she pored over books that she had stored under the bed many years ago.

At last, as the moon in February grew round and St. Valentine's Day approached, she worked a spell. She embroidered certain symbols on a small sachet of muslin. She filled the little bag with carefully chosen herbs, flowers, and stones. She rubbed the bag between and around her breasts and over her belly, humming over it. She left it on the windowsill overnight where the full moon's light soaked it.

In the morning, she did a load of her boy's laundry he had brought over. She dropped the little bag into the rinse cycle and drummed her fingers softly on the lid of the washer. Before putting the clothes into the dryer, she removed the bag and put it aside; that night, she buried it in the yard beneath the waning moon.

Years passed. A strange flower sprang up from where she had buried the charm, then withered and was never seen again. A fairy ring of mushrooms appeared and disappeared every few months. Her son came home or spoke with her while visiting his father and talked of friends, hockey, his studies, sometimes (and with much anxiety) his future. The moon was full again near Valentine's Day and the fairy ring glistened beneath the moonlight when he came home hand in hand with a tiny Asian woman who had streaks of paint and glitter on her denim jacket, a jacket which used to be her son's. 

"Mom, this is Lardo. You know Lardo, but... we just got engaged."

**Author's Note:**

> I am [rembrandtswife](http://rembrandtswife.tumblr.com) on Tumblr, and [samwellalumna](http://samwellalumna) is my CP sideblog.


End file.
